Philip Tsiaras (American, b. 1952)

Philip Tsiaras works in a wide range of mediums, including painting on canvas, glass, ceramic and bronze, and photography. Tsiaras was born in 1952 in Nashua, New Hampshire. He graduated from Amherst College, where he studied Comparative Literature and worked with Lucas Samaras. In 1976 he traveled to Greece on a poetry fellowship to translate modern Greek poetry into English. When he returned to the United States he began to work with photography, exploring the relationship between verbal and visual representation, a project that evolved into the series the “Family Album.” Tsiaras has had more than seventy solo exhibitions around the world and his works are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and other important museums in the United States, Italy, Germany, and Austria. His participation in the Venice Biennale 2001 was a great success. Some twenty million visitors saw his Social Climber, a 3 meters high sculpture, situated for five months in front of the Grand Canal.